Authors

Abstract

This paper explores the role that community social identity plays in an entrepreneur’s decisionmaking process about rebuilding her business following a natural disaster. Existing literature regarding natural disasters has focused on the financial determinants at the near exclusion of social-psychological variables, leaving a gap in the literature that our empirical study aims to address. One hundred and twelve business owners from Joplin, Missouri, which was impacted by an F-5 tornado in May 2011, have been surveyed eight months after this natural disaster. The results indicate that the constructs of interdependency belief and group attractiveness have a significant relationship with the entrepreneur’s decision to rebuild.